Thursday, November 19, 2015

Imagine this: peanut butter, bananas, ice cream, and milk
blended together to utter perfection. That's right. I'm talking about a peanut
butter banana milkshake. Yum. No, actually that's not a good enough word to
describe that miraculous blending of flavor. It doesn't quite do it justice. At
least, that's how the heroine from my Funeral
CrashingMystery Series, Kait
Lenox, feels.

That awesome concoction is her favorite treat. She calls it
heaven on earth. She likes her peanut butter banana milkshake from one place
particularly, a coffee shop called Wired. Even a murder mystery can't deter her
from them. She is that obsessed.

I'll admit it. I get cravings for a peanut butter banana
milkshake every once in a while too and I had my own brief fixation with them.
That's why it made its initial appearance. I was participating in the 3 Day
Novel Contest when I started Adventures
in Funeral Crashing and I was writing what I knew - that peanut butter
banana milkshakes rock!

From that initial
idea, the milkshake took on a life of its own in the story. Kait can't stop
talking about them. It's her go-to comfort food and beverage of choice when it
shows up on a menu. She even uses it to compare how great something is and the
only thing that can beat the phenomenal bliss of a peanut butter banana
milkshake from Wired is a kiss from her crush, Ethan Ripley. It must be true
love then, right?

Kait's love of the peanut butter banana milkshake has
evolved, though. In Adventures in Funeral
Crashing Kait gushes about them endlessly and drinks them whenever the
opportunity presents itself, but in a later book, Adventures in Murder Chasing, you learn that there's more to the
story than her love of a simple milkshake. She used to share her passion for them
with her now ex-best friend, Ariel. It was their thing to go to Wired, drink
them, and gossip...until their friendship ended. Their complicated friendship/ex-friendship
spans the series and their dual love of peanut butter banana milkshakes is just
a piece of their story.

So, now we have the milkshake's backstory. This brings up an interesting
question. What will be the next chapter in the journey of Kait and her peanut
butter banana milkshake love affair? What does the future hold? Will she be
able to find one when she heads off to Paris in the next Funeral Crashing book or will a mystery get in the way? More
importantly, who will be sharing that milkshake with her?